Dear Nokia, I love your engineers. But please ditch your marketing department, just soon as you fire your CEO Stephen Elop, the $hill from Micro$oft. I miss you lots.

Oblig XKCD to explain rule #34 in-a-click: https://www.xkcd.com/305, for those that provide relevant cultural references without one.

May I point out there's Linux Mint for Debian XFCE for us to consider? It looks (and sounds) like a nice workstation OS, based on Debian testing. Arguably, the Linux Mint devs are competing head to head with Canonical, using Debian, while keeping a steady eye on Ubuntu releases.

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1725

FAQ # 2

2. Is Linux Mint switching to Debian?

No. Linux Mint is Linux Mint, it’s not based on anything per se. It provides different editions which include different upstream components. In regards to package bases and repositories, what’s happening today is that the Xfce edition of Linux Mint is switching two important things:

        It’s switching its package base from a frozen Ubuntu pool to the rolling Debian Testing branch.
        It’s switching its lightweight software selection to a more mainstream one.

I clicked it and now I cannot see. (Maybe my eyes are bleeding too!)

They took the bar! The whole fucking bar! -Bluto

Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son." -Dean Wormer, Animal House.

At this time, only three countries - Burma, Liberia, and the US - have not adopted the International System of Units (SI, or metric system) as their official system of weights and measures. Although use of the metric system has been sanctioned by law in the US since 1866, it has been slow in displacing the American adaptation of the British Imperial System known as the US Customary System. The US is the only industrialized nation that does not mainly use the metric system in its commercial and standards activities, but there is increasing acceptance in science, medicine, government, and many sectors of industry.

Sort of off-topic I'll grant you, but ain't it an interesting factoid and source folks?

U.S. CIA World Factbook

As a web-Dev, I must disagree. For the logos, backgrounds, textures and whatnot I am called to deal with, GIMP is perfectly adequate for the task. In fact since I work with Drupal hosted on Debian/LAMP servers, I dig on Ubuntu as the Power-Client (free!) because the OS is so similar when I work for clients (actual, paying clients).

What is not cool is having to stop work and having to ask the client paying for my time, to also fund a Photoshop purchase (even Elements which costs $/euro 100 at the local office supply store, but this takes time folks). Since Ubuntu offers GIMP along with native SSH/SFTP, (etc., etc.) I'm ready to work, and get paid.

And of course VMs run really well on a project too, and are extremely portable across hardware workstations, with excellent Developer snapshot facilities, but I digress.

Yes I agree. And while we're ditching Empathy, can we get Ekiga back for SIP calls that 'just work', or otherwise Jitsi?

I would. But what's the Android counterpart to an iPod touch?

An option might be to use Nokia's upcoming N9 Linux phone, with Android running in a virtual machine when you really want it. The phone is supposed to come with Alien Dalvik installed (an Android VM compatibility layer). Available in a single solid block of black, blue, or pink polycarbonite with curved Gorilla glass and no buttons on the face.

What kinda excites me as a developer, besides it being linux and an upgrade to my N900 and all that, is the GUI is worked out for single-handed usage.

http://www.slashgear.com/nokia-n9-android-app-support-promised-with-alien-dalvik-22160809/
http://swipe.nokia.com/

In the U.S. the Amazon.com store seems to be the best place I've seen so far to buy such unlocked phones.

Cup holder: Check. Rear view mirrors are a nice touch but probably superfluous.

www.12voip.com

Been using them well over 1 year, they are a betamax company: http://backsla.sh/betamax

When I buy in 10 euro amounts, I get 10 free days. Seems I only my use credit to call Dutch mobile phones at $.06 per minute. The free days cover pretty much cover all my landline calls in 'most modern VOIP countires' such as NL, US, UK, etc. Check out the rates yourself. I don't limit how much I call or for how long and my costs are like a few euros over several months, not tens of dollars.

Bought a Polycom IP-650 phone, but the codecs also work great using my Nokia phones. www.voipcheap.com is #2 in my book.

People flinch at the betamax voip service, but no one seems to bother to sort out the correct asterisk settings, although the SIP termination configuration is fairly well documented on all the betamax sites. My quality is perfect, and my callers/callees agree.

I do not WANT to give my email to Google. I really don't. But I need a multi-PC/mobile solution (i.e. an IMAP server), and I ran my own (hosted) server for my own domain for years, until the spam completely overwhelmed me. I used Tuffmail for awhile, although their spam controls are not-user friendly and I find their documentation very hard to apply. Tuffmail is reasonably priced, although not long ago I went on a cost-cutting spree and Tuffmail got hit.

To-date I use gmail, because they are managing my spam effectively, and for free. (Except for the privacy thing, so I must 'trust' the GOOG for what they claim). I still don't like Google Mail though; they are an advertising company, and I am the product being delivered to their clients.

I use Thunderbird mostly, via gmail IMAP. I wish fighting IMAP-spam were easier.

The word Hajji means a person who has made, or is in the process of making a religious pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. This pilgrimage itself is called the Hajj. The Hajj terminal in Jeddah is the largest airport in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdulaziz_International_Airport

In the context you have used, you are referring to a violent person. Hajjis have nothing whatsoever to do with violence, they are religious pilgrims.

I could not agree with you more, especially when one considers Elop clearly had access to something pretty close to the released N9 waaay back in February when he wrote the burning oil platform memo, as justification to sleep with Microsoft and kill off All Direction and Resources up to that point in time.

How would Steve Jobs have made the world know the N9 was The Latest and Greatest Nokia phone (until the next one of course)? He'd Sell it! Yet the very next day Elop hacks together something so lame, it certainly speaks for itself, actions being louder than words and all; with that hindsight clarity.

What grieves me is it is so clear the team that delivered the very fine N9 is not being praised to the highest for what they managed to do, and the day after the announcement the CEO does everything he can to belittle their most-solid straight-on-target deliverable. This lame public presentation and its timing must not look good to the board. (And that video was shot with 2, sync'd tripod'd cameras, anyone can see that it isn't a cameraphone video that 'leaked')

How could the N9 team have done any better? I hope the market answers in a most solid way, without Elop's further interference. Elop's tenure is a matter of time, and I hope it is short because I can't wait for whatever happens in the post-Elop era. Who would want to work for this guy?

I don't really need a new phone, both my N95 & N900 are still perfect machines, with SIP, etc. But now I want an N9 bad, and I want to develop apps for the swipe single-handed GUI. I can envision web-clients to my OpenAtrium development that crackberry CEO-types might like; and the single-handed interface development seems like a good investment once iOS and Droid adopt it too.

I've been telling my friends about the N9 Linux phone, and I'm gonna buy Mom her first smartphone, N9. And I don't see why not, I mean really? Why do people say it is like buying a dead technology? If I like the phone and it works and it lasts, it isn't dead at all. It isn't like someone will make it stop working because something else is coming later. As far as apps go, my N900 does very well with the free open-source apps available at repo http://maemo.org/ and when Apple talks about 'over the air sync' I gotta laugh, since linux does this like a normal thing. I trust the ongoing linux community for support, and I want to support the effort that went into this particular, open, product.

As a developer, I saw the N9 GUI and got totally psyched. Disclaimer: I like Linux and open-source. That said, the single-handed swipe mobile GUI is The Future and I can already see Apple, HP, Google, etc. photocopy machines switching ON. (I already got a feel for it first-hand using FireFox 5 Mobile on my recently purchased, low-price N900; ...but the price shot up nearly 175% after May 23rd when no N9 was announced at the San Francisco Meego conference and I digress).

More disclaimers + My Point: I am a Drupal developer and have yet to write a mobile client-app. I develop a lot using Drupal & www.openatrium.com which is a custom Distribution of Drupal. OpenAtrium is an intranet-in-a-box. The person I want to win over is the Crackberry CEO and I see the Nokia N9 swipe GUI as The Future, so I want to develop a single-handed mobile client for my customer. I want a Nokia N9/N950 BAD to get started, get it done, and then move on to Maemo-open-source ...iOS/Android/WebOS once they get the single-handed GUI-thang goin' for them too.